Tag: market structure

This column may come across as irritable, confused or just an incoherent babble – but all I can say is that the nation you love only wins the world championship in a sport you love for the first time once, but unfortunately I had to sit up until 5am to actually see it (and actually […]

Probably the big news in markets this week was the swingeing cuts at Deutsche Bank and while I cannot see this through anything other than a prism of regulation – specifically the courage of some regulators to take action while other put their head in the sand and hope it goes away – I wonder […]

For all the talk of institutionalising crypto markets, progress is slow – Colin Lambert talks to Campbell Adams, founder and CEO of Pure Digital about how he plans to accelerate the transformation Although the end result in terms of hard numbers doesn’t really tell the story, the creation of the FX Pure trading platform, which […]

There’s something for everyone in this week’s In the FICC of It podcast as Colin Lambert and Galen Stops traverse the US legal system, trading, crypto and China.
Listen in as Lambert explains why he is mystified at the prosecution’s flip-flop in the Mark Johnson case and angry at the FX industry’s previous lack of effort to explain how markets work to the US legal authorities; and Stops takes a look at a new report n his favourite industry – CTAs. Having had the data explained to him, Lambert also thinks he knows why some CTA sectors are doing well and some aren’t, so that’s another of his “theories” then…
Our podcasters then move onto debate whether crypto markets will evolve to an OTC model and whether this would be a good thing for attracting institutional money to what is still a relatively nascent market.
Stops closes out by reporting from an analysts’ briefing this week that highlighted a change in approach on the part of China to its programme of liberalisation of the yuan.

In football parlance it’s a tap in for Galen Stops and Colin Lambert in this week’s podcast as they have more academic-research-that-states-the-obvious to poke fun at. Listen in as they discuss last week’s report on the Swiss National Bank debacle in 2015 as well as the FX market’s handling of the Brexit vote. They also take a look at the potential impact of last week’s HSBC announcement that it had settled FX trades using distributed ledger technology, as well as the mysterious disappearance from marketing material of two asset classes at a recent platform media day.

In this week’s podcast Galen Stops shares some feedback about a previous week’s discussion on electronification of NDFs and Colin Lambert reports from an equity-focussed market structure conference, some of the statements from which, surprised him and lead to another one of his “theories” about the relationship between FX and equities. Our two podcasters also […]

It’s a bumper edition of In the FICC of it this week as Colin Lambert and Galen Stops prepare to head off to Forex Network Chicago 2018, with both giving previews of the main issues that they plan to tackle on the panel sessions that they are moderating.
The pair also discuss a report by the New York state Attorney General, which highlighted some major concerns about some of the crypto trading venues operating today. But the most interesting aspect of this story is the response of one exchange that decided to hit back at the AG in rather spectacular fashion – Lambert and Stops highlight some of the shots fired on (where else?) Twitter.

In this week’s podcast Galen Stops explains the devil in the detail behind the SEC rejecting bitcoin ETFs, the changing market structure in crypto generally, and how market participants are going about institutionalising the new asset class.
Colin Lambert meanwhile, is in a punchy mood and wants to take everything and everybody to task.
They observe how crypto-strategists are just the same as fiat strategists; discuss the barriers to entry for currency managers; the pricing of credit and liquidity in FX; and Lambert in particular has a problem with investors’ approach to allocating to hedge funds.

This column is going to sound angry, but it isn’t really, it is more mystified!
I think this morning in Asia we saw how the lack of risk takers in banks is confusing and, possibly, deterring customers from having a punt on events. Into the bargain I think they highlighted the point I made last week about how a couple of opportunistic macro funds, who were not ring-fenced by their mandate, are actually having a decent run of things at the moment.

We often think ‘big is better’, but some hedge funds over the years have undergone the type of experience to make them question that adage. The scale of their success ultimately put too much pressure on the business and they had to scale back, or bifurcate their funds into internal and external investment pools. There is another advantage of not being institutionalised, as well, because thanks to the changing market structure, style drift may not be as taboo as it once was.